On a wall in the occupied building, Thomas Münzer's 16th century slogan, meaning roughly "Everything for everyone!"

Background: Last night around 75 people entered an enormous empty building on Capitol Hill after a march entitled, “You Can’t Evict an Idea! Occupy Everything”. Hundreds of people came in and out of the building: writing slogans, dancing with friends to live bands, giving speeches, and sharing food. The building is set to be demolished shortly for luxury apartments. Police and SWAT raided the building at 3AM that morning. 13 arrests.

Turritopsis Nutricula is a multi-gendered, multi-cultural, multi-generational collective of individuals with varied sexual orientations, subcultural affinities and favourite foods. We are a Revolutionary household. By this we mean that we are opposed to police, prison, borders, racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, body-policing, speciesism, fascism, capitalism and any other form of oppression.

In Paris, May 1968, students held massive occupations at some of France’s most prestigious university campuses. When riot police crushed the first of these protests, popular support grew and within days more than a million marched through the streets of the city. Workers started independently occupying factories, beginning one of the only general strikes to ever fully paralyze an industrialized, first-world nation. This was a wildcat strike, led autonomously and directly by workers, rather than any union bureaucracy.(more…)

Pdf of illustrated pamphlet for printing here (select “print on both sides” and “flip up pages”). Illustrated pdf for on-screen reading here.

The “99% Movement” has adopted the term “occupy” from the anti-capitalist tradition, in which people have occupied workplaces, neighborhoods, school buildings, etc., as moves toward taking control over the “means of production” in order to make things and share them, “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” without the mediation of money. However, starting with the original Adbusters call, an influential current within the movement has suppressed this history, treating “occupation” as a temporary and symbolic means of petitioning the government to crack down on “corporate greed” and “corruption.” As anti-capitalists, we oppose such reformism not because we’re attached to some “radical” identity, and certainly not out of nostalgia for the old “socialist” movements (whether of Stalinist or social democratic varieties – both ended up producing only different forms of capitalism). It is simply that the reformist agenda has failed repeatedly. (Anti-capitalist movements, on the other hand, from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the present, have only been defeated, or undermined by confusion; prior to defeat, they have shown some promising beginnings.) Reformism has failed because any meaningful pro-worker regulations eventually become fetters to capital’s health, so it becomes necessary to dismantle them – to “save the economy” (i.e. capitalism). That’s what we’re experiencing now, and a return to more regulation, more taxing of the rich to fund social services, etc., is something capital cannot afford without first restoring the rate of profit, which (if possible) would require more of the same: rising unemployment, falling wages, cuts to public goods and services, and the acceleration of energy wars and environmental devastation, bringing us ever closer to catastrophe. So reformism is “utopian”; the only “realistic” way out of this mess is the path we have yet to forge.

What are some people saying is causing the crisis faced by the 99%?
Overpopulation: are there too many people on the planet?
Corporate greed: do bank managers and corporate
executives just need to be more generous or responsible?
China: is the problem that Chinese workers took “our”
jobs or that China owns too much US debt?
Lack of jobs creation: do we need another stimulus
package?
Regressive taxes: would taxing the rich get rid of our
problems?
A weak Democratic Party: does Obama just need a
stronger backbone?
These are all easy answers, and none of them really explain our problem…